Palantir's AI Is Playing a Major Role in Tracking Gaza Aid Deliveries

Hacker News · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation today.U.S. Army personnel monitor screens displaying maps and imagery of the Gaza Strip during a media tour inside the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) on November 20, 2025 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The screen (above left) shows the use of Palantir’s Gaia application, billed as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view.” Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images.Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza.The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say.“The United Nations already has a humanitarian architecture in place to step in during crises, abiding by humanitarian principles and grounded in international law,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory Francesca Albanese told Drop Site. “This profit-driven parallel system involving companies like Palantir, already linked to Israel’s unlawful conduct, can only be regarded as a monstrosity.”The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October, one week after the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Gaza to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” Last week, at the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace in Washington, D.C., Major General Jasper Jeffers—who was tapped in January to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza—announced that the CMCC will serve as the Board of Peace’s operational headquarters.According to the sources, a representative from Palantir sits in the CMCC operations room where aid convoys and distributions inside Gaza are monitored through drone surveillance. The representative integrates convoy and distribution-related data into Palantir’s systems, the sources said.Palantir did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site on its role in the CMCC or in aid distribution in Gaza. Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel with the help of investments from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir is known for its work with government agencies, including the U.S. military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).In January 2024, three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palantir announced it had entered into a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military for “war-related missions.” The company’s board meeting that month in Tel Aviv was held “in solidarity” with Israel, Bloomberg reported. Palantir did not disclose what technologies would be provided to Israel but a year earlier the company introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to help militaries rapidly analyze and identify bombing targets. The company’s technology has been described by a Palantir executive as a way of “optimizing the kill chain.” Palantir’s software has also been used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza, according to a biography of its CEO, “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State” by Michael Steinberger.In a June 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese found “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.”The use of Palantir to track aid deliveries to Gaza is of particular concern to observers. “The distinction between death by drone and delivery of aid is being evaporated while we all sit around the same table,” a source from the diplomatic community who attends CMCC sessions told Drop Site.Palantir’s two main platforms are Gotham and Foundry. “Gotham’s targeting offering supports soldiers with an Al-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing,” according to the company’s website. Foundry is Palantir’s platform for supply chain management and is billed as a way to “bridge siloed planning and execution processes, optimize inventory management, and help build supply chain resilience for economic and geopolitical uncertainty.”Palantir does not operate its systems in isolated silos. According to the company’s own documentation, “Palantir AIP and Foundry are designed to interoperate with the full range of data, logic, AI, workflow, and security systems.” A feature called “Type Mapping” allows data entered into the civilian Foundry system to be instantly synchronized and queried by the military’s Gotham platform.This means that, in theory, information that is being gathered at the CMCC—including from participating governments the UN and NGOs regarding the type of aid being distributed, its distribution locations and systems, and truck convoy routes—could be seamlessly pulled into Gotham’s AI targeting matrix. The same software logic used to track aid at the CMCC could be used to optimize and accelerate lethal airstrikes.There is no information available as to whether Gotham and Foundry are the specific products being used to track aid, but publicly available photographic evidence indicates that Palantir’s Gaia—a platform referred to on their website as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view”—is being deployed at the CMCC.In an interview with Drop Site on the role of Palantir in Gaza, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and a former member of Greece’s parliament, described an encounter he had with a Palantir representative who had explained to him the benefit the company gained from Gaza. “He was saying that ‘as the bombs fell we were having a party,’” Varoufakis said. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir representative explained how the chaos of intense violence in a high-density urban area like Gaza generates substantial data for training their AI models on how humans respond under stress. “The more bombardment and havoc, the better the training,” Varoufakis said.“It’s one thing to say that companies like Lockheed Martin make money selling F35s to the Israelis,” he said. “That has been a time-honored way that the military industrial complex has benefited from war and genocide and war crimes.” He continued, “This is the first instance in history where it is the suffering of a people being subjected to genocide and bombing—the suffering itself—which is adding to the capital of a company which then uses that capital to produce commodities to sell elsewhere.”Palantir operates on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, led by Larry Ellison—a major donor to the Israeli military who also funds the Tony Blair Institute, which has itself consulted on governance mechanisms for Gaza.The growing use of Palantir and other private sector companies in Gaza comes as the non-profit sector is being systematically squeezed out. As of March 1, 2026, Israel will ban dozens of aid groups from operating in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under new registration rules, including prominent NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and Medical Aid for Palestinians.The new measures require aid groups to register the names and contact information of employees and to provide details about their funding and operations to Israeli authorities. The aid groups said in a joint statement this week that “the demand to transfer personal data raises acute security and legal risks. It exposes national staff to potential retaliation and undermines established data protection and confidentiality safeguards.”“NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza because aid delivered by humanitarian organizations is based on need and is provided to people wherever they are located,” said an aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. “This doesn’t match the vision of the ‘New Gaza’ where Palestinians will need to be displaced again into the zones where reconstruction will be permitted and their access to aid will be controlled through screening.”Not all NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza. Others—on a list of registered and approved organizations—are expanding their role alongside the private sector. These include Christian groups like Samaritan’s Purse and GAiN, both of whom were involved in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and who sources from the diplomatic community have recently seen gathering in a “prayer circle” at the CMCC.These approved NGOs, alongside private firms coordinated through the CMCC like Palantir, stand ready to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza.“Aid in Gaza has been stripped to bare survival and its future delivery appears to be faith based, profit driven, militarized and certainly not to be delivered by anyone that dares to speak out about what Palestinians are being subjected to,” said a senior aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity.Gaza’s experience with private delivery mechanisms has been catastrophic. In May 2025, the U.S. and Israeli-backed GHF was contracted to distribute aid in the enclave. During the four and half months the GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites.The former h